Al-Azhar University has an impressive history and is Egypt's oldest degree-granting university. The university was founded in 970 or 972 in Cairo, Egypt providing the opportunity to study Islamic law, logic, grammar and rhetoric. Even more impressive, Al-Azhar University represents the only university in the Arabic world to survive as a modern university.
Founded by the Fatimids in 970 A.D., al-Azhar has been described variously as “the great mosque of Islam,” “the brilliant one,” “a great seat of learning...whose light was dimmed.” Yet despite its assumed centrality, the illustrious mosque-seminary has elicited little critical study. The existing historiography largely relies on colonial-nationalist teleologies charting a linear narrative of greatness (the ubiquitous ‘Golden Age’), followed by centuries of decline, until the moment of European-inspired modernization in the late nineteenth century. The temporal grid is in turn plotted along a spatial axis, grounded in a strong centrifugal essentialism that reifies culturalist geographies by positioning Cairo (and al-Azhar) at a center around which faithfully revolve concentric peripheries.
Setting its focus on the eighteenth century and beyond, this dissertation investigates the discursive postulates that organize the writing of the history of al-Azhar through textual explorations that pivot in space (between Europe and non-Europe) and time (modernity and pre- modernity). It elucidates shifts in the entanglement of disciplines of knowledge with those of ‘the self’ at a particular historical juncture and location, while paying close attention to the act of reading itself: its centrality as a concept and its multiple forms and possibilities as a method.
It thus locates al-Azhar in the modern order of knowledge, even as it imagines another intellectual universe bounded by ideas, texts and authors who lived before and outside Europe: one which articulated itself in conceptual, epistemic, moral, social, cultural and institutional ways, modernity as such cannot not capture.
List of Illustrations iv
Acknowledgements v Introduction: On the Importance of Being al-Azhar and Other Historiographical Spectacles
- Spatio-temporal Collisions and the Persistence of Modernity
- Al-Azhar in the Philological Order of Things
- Spiraling Historiography
- Words, Orders, Disciplines: Or, the Road to Ballynahinch
- Chapter Outline
- A Word on Sources
Chapter One: The Spaces of Modern Time
- The Idea of the (Islamic) University
- Force of Law, Force of History
- Reform. In Three Acts
- The University through Arab Eyes
- Indigenous Grammars
Chapter Two : Disciplining the Bibliographic Imagination
- More than Words: Traversing the Bibliographic Imagination
- Orientalism as Library
- The Repositories of Nation-Empires
- A Figure of Lack: Al-Jabartī, ‘Science’ and the Library
- Al-Maktabah al-Azhariyyah
- Education for Heritage, Heritage for Education
Chapter Three: On Searching for Africans in al-Jabartī
- History, Language and Race: The Arab, the African
- A Liberal Incitement to Racial Discourse
- ‘Al-Jabartī and the Africans’
- Embodied Writing
- Embodied Reading
Chapter Four: Muhammad al-Kashnāwī and the Everyday Life of the Occult
- Re-enactments
- Manuscripts, Mosque and Market: Anthropological Meanderings
- The Magic of Modernity: Or White Magic, Black Magic
- Shaping Azhari Orthodoxy
- Al-Durr al-Manzūm: Glimpses of an Esoteric Episteme
Conclusion: “Man errs, till he has ceased to strive”
Bibliography
For transliterations from the Arabic, I have generally followed the system of the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES), with but with some variations. For certain words, I have used more common forms (e.g. Qur’an, ijāza, ʿulama, sunna, shariʿa, Sufi etc.), except when quoting from another source, in which case I have left the transliteration as it appears in the original. Full diacritical notations have been retained for the names of historical (and in many cases, contemporary) persons and for the titles of works in Arabic.
Translations derived from published sources are noted in the text.